2024 depth sounding

Resisting the Machine: An interview with Peco Gaskovski - Jonathan Van Maren

Moving Mountains - Fr. Stephen Freeman

Our Godless Era is Dead - Paul Kingsnorth

Simple Acts of Sanity - A Seed Catalogue - Ruth Gaskovski and Peco

This were to be new-made when thou art old - Mary Harrington

Five thought-provoking articles I read lately: five points of view that I’m thinking about as I consider 2024. 

There are plenty of other interesting articles I could have showcased here of course, but these have stuck with me in part because I read them in this festive, but also restive, dark but also bright time of year. The Christmas meals and gift exchanges have come and gone, and now here I am with the gift of time.

It’s interesting to compare how I imagine this time of leisure will feel, versus how it actually feels. I imagine time without work schedules and activities will feel relaxing and peaceful, like putting down a heavy backpack and taking a long stretch. In reality, the absence of schedules and activities means unforeseen preoccupations bubble up. I have trouble sleeping. Anxiety suddenly attaches itself to…..almost anything. My body aches for no understandable reason. Until I learn to set a goal for each day, accomplish something myself and with the kids, it’s truly not very enjoyable at all. I have learned (but somehow also have to constantly re-learn) that every day needs to have some kind of a plot: a beginning, middle and end, and some sort of challenge or goal.

Anyway, I will challenge myself to pull a quote out of each article and link it to a thought or intention for the year. I haven’t thought a great deal about this, so I’m likely to surprise myself.  I’m going to publish this before it is complete, because then it’s easy to use my own links, and because I think it’s okay if it’s a work in progress.

A “traditioned” life is not a static existence. Instead, it is something of a co-existence. The givenness of life is allowed. The mountains get a vote (or even a veto). There are many “mountains” in our lives – it is an ever-present feature of a material existence. Our planet is “traditioned” in a very unique position. That position (and much else that has been given us) make life possible. Very slight changes to that position would make life (certainly human life) impossible. At some point in our future, the ravages of an ice age will return (and there will be nothing we can do about it).  —Fr. Stephen Freeman

My environment is full of the same kind of reminders that Fr. Freeman’s is. I am a fairly short drive away from the mountains, from wild areas that while not unmarked by people, are much more wild than civilized. But I also live in a city with many places that aren’t built to a human walking scale. So I’ve always been aware of this tension from my earliest years. My overriding feeling returning to a city as a child was that I was moving from something real to something less real.  As I got older I learned to also appreciate the beautiful things that people can create, especially by participating in something social. So that made the city more “real” to me.

But I still have a frequent desire to visit places where the schemes of humans are, if not completely absent (I’m not a wilderness survivalist!) then at least more humble. So for the new year, find ways to live with things how they are, not try to change them to fit a whim.

 ...if God thinks and feels and speaks—if God has something like a ‘mind’—then maybe to be fully human means exercising our own mental functions, and not enfeebling them through excessive device use. Or, if God is face-to-face relationship as a Trinity, then our real center is not within us, but within the other—in our real relationships. And if God made the earth, plants, and animals, then maybe being human means staying physically close to these things.  

All that might sound very basic, yet in all these areas—mind, relationship, nature, embodiment—the ‘Machine’ competes against God, by framing every part of reality as a biological mechanism or a simulation, to be manipulated according to our caprice. I think this is where the real battle is—a battle to answer the question, “What is reality?” 

But this is not a question for Christians alone. It matters to all of us, and I think we need to wrestle with it in our families, our schools, even in our politics. We’ll come up with varying answers, but what matters is that we’re left with a robust moral awareness of the dark side of technology. Without that, the only thing left to wake us up will be suffering.  --Peco Gaskovski

I would like to keep this question in my mind for the next year: "What is reality?" and "What does it mean to be human?" As I've noted before, questions tend to stick in my mind most effectively. I don't know all the answers to these questions, but I think they are good for framing decisions and conversations.

...if commitment comes with risks, the price of trying to avoid those risks is higher still. Committing to family life may be to risk abandonment. But the manosphere, and it female mirror-image ideology of Sex and the City liberal feminism, is a sterile, futile war not just on emotional risk but the inevitabilities that stand behind that risk: time, ageing, and death. The advice offered by these ideologies is far worse than risk-taking: to eschew all the long-term commitments that make life meaningful, in case the sight of your partner ageing normally reminds you of the passage of time. Grow old anyway, and leave no legacy of love to nourish the next generation. --Mary Harrington

This paragraph probably sums up the truth I would most like to pass on to my daughters. So many contemporary popular fictions (aka politics, belief systems, ideologies)  have an unspoken assumption: namely, that one can (and should) live forever the way that one (might) live in one's twenties. From one perspective, this might look like personal autonomy, or even eternal youth. But it is a terribly brittle mindset, implying that the only good things in life are the things we choose and the things we control. Change and loss come for all of us, however. Things we cannot control, both welcome and unwelcome, happen to all of us. Just based on my experience, however, the things we do not control are sometimes the very things we need. It seems to me that the sane way to live is invest some time in figuring out what and who is important, stick with it/them, and not try to bulldoze every mountain that stands in the way.

A feast without a fast is a strange, half-finished thing: this is something I’ve only learned recently. We are coming up to the greatest annual feast of all, the one that most people, whether Christian or not, are going to end up celebrating. I’ve celebrated Christmas all my life, mostly with no religious trappings, and I’ve always loved it — more so since I became a father. But Christmas, in historical terms, is only one of a number of great feasts that make up the Christian ritual year, which was once — and still is in those parts of the world which continue to take it seriously — studded with saints days, festivals, processions, and feasts. --Paul Kingsnorth

There are so may paragraphs in Paul's essay I could have showcased. But I chose this one because the fast/feast rhythm is something I've been thinking about the past while. I observe how important holidays are when I see how my children feel about them. Christmas, Easter, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Halloween, birthdays: as soon as one holiday come to an end, they start looking toward the next one and talking about how to prepare for it. Of course they look forward to treats/gifts associated with these holidays, but that's not the only thing: holidays structure their year, as do things like the school calendar now that they are in school, and the various performances and festivals that they participate in through their dance program. I also observe the importance of making holidays about something more than just treats and gifts. If the focus is only on gifts, they get increasingly dissatisfied with them. After all, once the gift is opened, the mystery is over....and maybe it's a let down. So, I find myself trying to re-ritualize. This year, before they opened Advent goodies, I asked the girls to tell me one thing they were grateful for. Once they go used to this routine, they really enjoyed this. And it also seemed to help them appreciate the small gift they received, rather than complaining about it or immediately moving on to the next shiny anticipate things (which has a tendency to happen).

This is a long way from a fast, admittedly, but I think it's a step in that direction: bringing some mindfulness to the moment in a small way. I would like to keep looking for ways to do this in the new year.

My last featured article is Ruth and Peco Gaskovski's list of anachronistic practices compiled from an informal survey of their readers. They categorized them as follows:

• Technology use (reducing, altering, removing, replacing)
• Self-sufficient, minimalist practices
• Embodied & mental practices
• Children and family
• Spiritual and relational practices

I enjoyed reading (and contributing) to the list because it is a reminder that we do have choices in how we interact with each other and with, or without, technology. There are a few of the listed practices I already do, most of the time or some of the time. Perhaps there are some I would like to try or try more often. I don't know. It's not a proscriptive list; rather it's again about bringing mindfulness to daily routines, and asking that question "What is reality?" I find it interesting as a reminder that, oh yes, there are people who think about these things and people who have found these practices helpful. Any sort of intention has to be grounded in reality, in the things that we do.

So that's where I'm at. This isn't a list of "resolutions". It's more an effort to name the kind of music I am listening for as I walk through the market, or the meadow, or wherever I am at the moment. I guess one thing I can admit is I don't feel clever enough to decide on or specify exactly what I think would make my life better. It's pretty good as it is, with more than enough daily triumphs and challenges to keep me busy, way more than I can write about here. Also I'm never in the mood to create a long to-do list in January, which still feels like hibernation time.

But change and new growth often begins quietly, subtly, privately and that suits this time of year. I look forward to "growing" these ideas this year.

Completed between December 28th 2023 and January 6th, 2024

Photos of dancers, and other fragments

 I spend a lot of time thinking about getting older these days.

I don't mean I have anything profound to say about it. Nor do I exactly sit down and dedicate time to thinking about getting older. Rather, as I go about my day, I find scenes from my past flitting across my memory. Something - an artifact, a photo, a phrase, a seen or remembered place - suddenly conjures up a memory. The content of the memories is not necessarily compelling, rather something of the atmosphere in which the memory was made.

For example, this year, as Christmas approaches, I often find myself remembering leaving my university after classes to go Christmas shopping. I would walk to the nearest mall, then ride the bus back after making my purchases. I remember watching the sunset through the windows of the bus. It is the ordinariness of the memory that makes it unforgettable.

Currently I'm re-reading (after a period of quite a few years) Jennifer Homans' Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet. The first time I read this book, I was pleasantly startled by the nostalgia I felt. It's the same reading it now. I was never a professional ballet dancer, or anything resembling one. And yet there is something so familiar about the people, the values, and especially the "scene" Homans describes. It brings to mind a kind of shabby-elite aesthetic. Daydreams lived out in bargain-renovated studios. The secret glamour of tulle and sequins hiding in a garment bag. When I was growing up dress-up clothes were in short supply. My daughters have had piles of floofy dresses from the time they were toddlers, but I only glimpsed such things occasionally. I wasn't even allowed to wear the tutu my mother made me except on parent viewing days. I have always associated the arts with genteel poverty. Musty rooms, scratched hardwood, lumpy linoleum, dusty curtains, old photographs on the walls. And yet there is nothing at all sad or pitiable about such memories. Maybe a kind of glorious sadness.

Today, I admit I don't try very hard to save money on my daughters' dance clothes because I crave the magical feeling of going to the dance store. When I was child, we would buy ballet shoes and uniforms at Classique Dancewear. They closed permanently a few years ago, hence my melancholy pleasure at typing out the full name. I clearly remember walking down the stairs to the store in the basement. Beautiful high-heeled ballroom shoes sparkled in glass cases. Mannequins modeled pancake tutus, the kind I knew I would never wear, because my mother could not get the tulle to stick out like that on my homemade tutus, no matter how hard she tried. And sequins, sequins in all colours sparkling everywhere. I never got to indulge in such frou-frou, however. My mother bought the Royal Ballet standard leotard and tights, and of course, new ballet slippers. The ballet slippers came (as they still do) in a flat cardboard box, one of many stacked on the shelf. I thought of this when I read (and viewed) the scene in Harry Potter where Harry buys his wand. The store where I shop for my daughters is welcoming, brightly lit, and very pink. Classique Dancewear on the other hand was Diagon Alley-meets-Moulin Rouge.

I fell in love with ballet after seeing a performance of Swan Lake. My first ballet classes were not at all like Swan Lake, however. They were in a run down, industrial part of the downtown. Maybe it was an artsy-fartsy, bohemian neighbourhood, but I didn't know what that was at the time. I just knew it was a bit scary to go to ballet. My mother would park near the railway station and then we would run across half a dozen railway lines to get to the studio, sometimes in front of an approaching train. I think we'd get arrested now for doing that. Later, maybe to avoid that maneuver, she would drop me off near the studio and I'd have to walk a block or two by myself downtown. I was coached in this and I affected an determined, severe look and manner so no questionable people would think of molesting me. (It worked, apparently).

My first ballet teacher was also a bit scary. I never even knew her name as a child, because we didn't use her name, we called her "Madame." She was old at the time, and most of the active teaching was done by younger women under her direction. But I do remember her once leading us at the barre, with a cigarette dangling from her red lips. She always smelled of cigarette smoke. At the end of class, we had to queue up and give her a hug and a kiss. I dreaded this because I had to smell her, but I wouldn't have dreamed of refusing. I just learned to hold my breath very discreetly.  My father never learned to like or trust Madame. He detested her smoking habit as much as I did, and unlike me had no qualms about expressing said dislike. Most devastatingly, he forbade me from taking part in the school recital. I don't really know why, but it involved (of course) a lot of extra rehearsals and maybe he thought this offered Madame too many opportunities for instruction of a dubious nature. Madame was not happy, and on one occasion even tried to trick me into staying for rehearsal. To no avail. My stage debut would have to wait for more years and another teacher. But I was not entirely sad in the end, because I got to join a more advanced class and ended up ahead of all my same-age peers.

I was perusing Glenbow Museum's "Mavericks" exhibit some years ago, and to my amused surprise, immediately recognized "Madame" from one of the biographies. "Mavericks" may have itself been regulated to history, although there is still a website with a few working links. But thanks to the project I found out my ballet teacher's name: Regina Cheremeteff. And so I can search the internet for her part in history, and a little part of mine.

Her biography:

Regina Bickel, 1912-1992, was born in Berlin, Germany on March 25, 1912. She toured Europe as a child ballerina under the stage name Regina Royce. She also worked as the director of an Italian company. In 1930 she married Count Michael Cheremeteff, ca. 1900-1943, and worked in his equestrian troupe based in Berlin. They had three children, Christina (Olso), Alexandra (Madsen),1933-2002, and Dmitry. She settled in Calgary, Alberta in 1956 and established the Calgary Russian Ballet School, of which she was director, choreographer and teacher until its closing in 1989. She died in Calgary on March 5, 1992 at the age of 79. Alberta Record

YMCA Calgary backs up my memories:

Her students called her “Madame” over the 30-plus years that she trained young ballet dancers in Calgary from the 1950s to the late 80s. ...As a child ballerina Regina Cheremeteff toured Europe en pointe, surviving two world wars before immigrating to Canada and moving to Calgary in 1956, where she established the Calgary Russian Ballet School. Not above trading her tutu for a tool-belt, Regina remodeled her dance studio herself, knocking out walls and tearing up floors.

Allan Cozzubbo Academy of Dance notes:

In 1963 she opened her downtown location on 8th Ave. SW. The school closed in 1989. in 1930 she had married Count Michael Cheremeteff (1900=1943) and worked in his Equestrian Troupe in Berlin. Her three Children are Christine-Alexandra and Dmitry --he became a professional ballet dancer and was a guest at her recital.  

Some additional digging, however, turned up an 1980 Calgary Herald story on Madame. I would recommend this for anyone who wants to know more about her than my few childhood memories can provide. I have retyped it to the best of my ability here, as the scanned article I found is unedited and mixed in with a hilariously dull article on Canadian constitutional politics. Incidentally however, both articles illustrate how much higher quality journalism was 40 odd years ago.

Perhaps most unnervingly, there is a gallery of photos in The University of Calgary's digital archives.

This picture is from 1986, and I'm pretty certain it depicts part of the performance that I was not allowed to participate in. If I had taken part in that recital, I could have been in this photo or a similar one. That's just freaky. Since about 2000, I have gotten used to brilliant colour digital photos that never age. By contrast, this picture and the others in the gallery look absurdly old.

Maybe my favourite photo is this one, however:

It's not the dancers my eye is drawn to here. This photo is also from the 80s, but these young women are older than I was then, although not really that much older, either. But what I like to look at is the barre and walls of the studio beside the posing dancers, because they look exactly as I remember them, though in black and white. I can almost feel that barre in my hand. The top one was close to eye level when I was youngest. The photos on the walls are all of Madame at various ages, in various costumes. I remember yellowed newspaper articles too. I'm not sure why all the archive photos are black and white, since colour photography was definitely invented in the 80s! Perhaps it was supposed to give the photos a timeless, glamourous feel. If so I don't think it worked: there is a campy nostalgia to the photos: All the dancers look like amateurs trying really hard. I don't mean that as a bad thing: it makes them all the more relatable. There is a grounding grittiness behind the fantasy. In the end - for me at least - that was a more lasting impression of ballet than professional perfection.

I clipped this photo for the sake of the young woman kneeling right in front:

I'm pretty sure that she is Miss Mimi, who was one of the younger teachers whom I best remember. Up till this week, Miss Mimi’s identity was as lost in my incomplete memories as Madame’s. But thanks to my digging this week, I realized she is Mimi Haeseker, and she has been “Miss Mimi” to generations of dancers. How awesome is that. And I also remembered she was (is?) a talented artist who painted ballerina bunny rabbits. I could get addicted to this amateur archive hunting.

All this trip down memory lane, and the urge to somehow preserve it here, before the traces disappear further, was brought to mind my Jennifer Homans' description of the diaspora of Russian ballet dancers and teachers in the States in between the World Wars. Anna Pavlova toured the Vaudeville circuit as "'Pavlova the Incomparable": [appearing] alongside minstrel shows, baseball-playing elephants, and other popular acts. If the theatrical fare tended toward the light, however, Pavlova and her audiences had no doubt about the seriousness of her art. Her natural charisma and ardent commitment left a powerful impression on an entire generation of American and European dancers." Madame would surely have been one of those who watched and learned. Homans continues:

"Pavlova was the most famous, but there were dozens of Russians like her: they toured America in various Ballet Russes spin-off troups between the wars (some carried on into the 60s) introducing - and converting - several generations of audiences to classical dance. (page 450) ...... "When they were too old or tired to perform, many of those dancers opened schools: they fanned out and set down roots in cities and towns across the country. .... Performance by performance, class by class, over many years, these itinerant Russians passed on their tradition. Not only steps and techniques: they brought to their lessons the entire Imperial orthodoxy of Russian ballet, and it was in their sweaty encounters with students that the long process of transplanting ballet to American minds and bodies began. (451)

Although Madame was German (married to a Russian) she branded her school as "Russian Ballet," and I see her as the heir of those Russian teachers, albeit about a generation younger. And I particularly like the description of how ballet becomes absorbed into dancers' minds and bodies. There's something grounding for me in reading Homan's book, and reading about Madame's life. Even if my cultural inheritance is fragmentary, those fragments still come from somewhere. I am the inheritor of something; I don't just exist alone, attempting to make it all up.

The bad not-so-old days: A meditation

A few weeks ago, I read this question on a blog: “Regardless of your position on how governments handled [Covid-19]*, how has the experience of living through a pandemic altered you?" 

I’ve tackled versions of this question before. My answers have been and will be unfolding for a while. I don’t pretend to fully understand all the strange currents that swept me along, even the ones that I somewhat chose to swim in.

I have also recently been feeling a deep sense of disgust for the entire Covid era and its peculiar anti-culture, and a desire to distance myself from it. This includes many of my own coping mechanisms, behaviours and choices from 2020 to early 2022.

Putting that aside for a moment.

One way I’ve changed is that I’ve become much more focused on how I keep myself entertained and fulfilled instead of expecting people or institutions outside of me to do this. I recognize that I am the most significant agent in my life, and my skills and choices are what most affect how engaged I am with life. This isn’t maybe a radical change but an intensifying of a belief that was always there.

It affects choices I make for myself and my children. For example, I feel much better paying for music lessons rather than paying to take them to concerts. The piano will always be there in our house to play, assuming we don’t knock it to pieces. I can’t on the other hand assume that a band or an orchestra or a ballet company will always be there. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Institutions that I imagined were stable and based on values that I share proved not to be during the Covid era. 

In hindsight, that destabilization was probably the most unnerving part of 2020-2022. A totalizing structure was imposed from above, and it made all the other structures that constituted reality seem unreal. School, work, family, friendships: suddenly they all had to be arbitrarily restructured. There was some opportunity in this sudden restructuring: a chance to work collaboratively, do things differently, maybe even sometimes better. It was a fleeting moment though, because the proposed “solutions” quickly became more authoritarian and arbitrary (vaccine mandates and passports, laws intruding on private life and relationships.) I was left wondering, what is really real in the society I inhabit? I have had to rebuild my faith in society, from the ground up. And I have not gotten very far yet. 

Crowded places are more likely to give me anxiety and are more likely to be places I avoid. 

This doesn’t have much to do with fear of Covid directly, as I was never very afraid of catching Covid and not much affected by it when I finally did (in June of 2022).

It’s more a distrust for large groups of people that I did not choose and whose purpose I am not entirely sure of. After being deprived of more conventional opportunities for gathering together, it seems to me like something dark came loose in the psyche of a lot of people and coming together for more sinister purposes has become exciting and desirable. A crowd is a bit like a wildfire that might go rogue and consume whatever gets in its way.

I don’t want any of that scene, and I usually avoid any area of the city known for demonstrations or large gatherings. In my city that would be our downtown core and the bigger shopping malls.

I haven’t given up on the public square. But I’m in the process of re-imagining what it means to me and how I engage with it. Large abstract concepts like nation and democracy and social contract shattered around me like brittle, weathered concrete. I don’t know what “Canada” means anymore. Maybe I never did. If I was to vote based on emotion, I would probably vote for a separatist political party right now. (I try not to vote based on emotion.)

None of this is reason for pessimism or despair.

I’ve said this in different ways before, but the local has become much more important to me. The smaller groups I’m embedded in have more to do with my sense of who I am than larger abstract identities. This includes:

-School (mine and my daughters’)

-Dance communities (2)

-Work colleagues

-Friends (neighbourhood friends are closer relationships, but I’m trying to keep the further ones active too)

-Local places and business (small, not malls eek)

-Extended family

The catch word of Covid-19 was “social distancing”. I survived by doing the opposite: pulling people closer to me.

So was the pandemic and all the disturbing deconstruction of reality a time warp or void? Yeah maybe. It feels that way often, and it feels like the best thing to do is shove all those memories in the darkest corner I can find for them. But the better challenge is to shine a light onto that void and dare it to show what it can reveal.

*Of course, I can’t truly separate my experience of governments from my experience of the Covid-19 era. But I also factor in my experiences of individual people, some of which were also pretty disturbing. But, it’s easier to give individual people grace, which is another reason I keep my focus firmly on the local and personal. We’re all just trying to survive in our own ways: sometimes we aim rightly, sometimes not.

Habits

Starting during the Covid-19 era, I became a regular wine-drinker. It was never excessive, but I started having a glass of wine either with dinner or before bed, mostly every day. Previously I would only drink if going out for dinner or on holidays. The nightly glass of wine became a way to relax and mark the end of my work day, when things were weird and there was nowhere to go and nothing to celebrate. 

When life gradually went back to “normal,” or whatever you want to call it, I just kept up this habit. I came to expect that glass of wine, and I would make sure I always had some, and feel “cheated” if I ran out.  I did stop drinking for a while in the summer of 2021, but then I started again in the fall when my stress level went up.

In July of 2023 I decided I would give it up for the summer. School was out, life was good, I was doing fun things for myself like ballet and barre class, so I decided I just didn’t need this extra thing. And it was fine. And then September came and school started and it was still fine.

There is something else I think is a factor. I started listening to Fr. Stephen De Young’s podcast The Whole Counsel of God this past summer. In this podcast he goes through the Bible verse by verse and explains it.  Most nights I put on an episode or two when I crawl into bed. I look forward to it. And - this is important - there are so many episodes I don’t worry about running out. I feel like I will be listening for months and months. The Bible will just keep giving and giving; I an confident of this.

Ever since I started listening to podcasts, I have always needed them to be long. I won’t listen to anything that is less than an hour. I actually feel anxious when I see a short time. Not all of the WCofG podcasts are long, but I can play them back to back and they just keep going. It’s really like one giant podcast.

I realized something just this week. Not only am I okay without the nightly glass of wine, I don’t even want it anymore.  I don’t remember the desire going away. Just now it is. Maybe this shouldn’t surprise me but it does, in a good way. It’s so hard to change habits even when you want to. I feel lucky that k was able to change this one. 

up the mountain, making a trail (two)

 I'm continuing to read Robert Orsi's History and Presence, alongside A Comparison of the Mennonite and Doukhabor emigrations from Russia to Canada, 1870-1920, by Robert Sawatsky. The purposes of each writer become clearer as I read, and my personal feelings and motivations can temporarily recede a bit, to come back later (one assumes) with greater clarity. I'm noting quotations from each as I go, and already have a significant amount of copied text and scribbled citations. I have a pleasant sensation of curiosity that is not fettered to any conclusion yet. I'm also having a flashback to my undergraduate days, when I seemed to have a knack or doom for finding the dustiest, obscurest, smelliest books in the library. Of course the dust on an online text is non-literal, but I think I can still see it out of the corner of my eye.

Anyway. Here is a passage from Orsi that resonated, on the topic of encountering a saint or deity. It references the story of Bernadette at Lourdes.

The testimonies visionaries give of their experiences are not exhaustive [...]. Both those who see and hear and their interlocutors sense that there are levels and dimensions of what is happening to and around them that are not completely within their grasp. To understand an experience, including an experience of real presence, involves relationality, conversation, doubt and ambiguity. It entails tracking back and forth between one life and other lives, as Bernadette and her family and neighbors did in their efforts to begin to understand events in the woods outside the village. But they did not succeed in containing the experience, which was probably not, in any case, their goal. "Life might be understood as precisely that which exceeds any account we may try to give of it," and this includes accounts of our life and the life around us that we give to ourselves, as well as to others. No life is to thoroughly embedded in given structures of meaning, discourse, and power as to be fully accounted for by them, just as meaning, discourse and power are rarely hermetic, coherent, unidirectional, and stable. Narratives of encounters with the saints are simply not isomorphic with experience, just as the holy figure is not completely identified with any one social environment. These stories are incomplete, contingent, and intersubjective. They are shot through with "unknowningness," studded with "opacities." Talk about the Blessed Mother and the saints is contingent upon the unpredictable supernatural figure and the never fully knowable lives of the others with whom stories of what the Blessed Mother has done are shared. Such stories are always in three voices, at least. There is the Virgin Mary, the one speaking, and the one listening.  In these exchanges, aspects of one's life previously unknown or unacknowledged may be discovered. The imagination takes hold of the world as the world takes hold of the imagination. This all belongs to the experience itself and to its history. "Human culture, like consciousness itself," Jackson writes, "rests on a shadowy and dissolving floe of blue ice, and this subliminal, habitual, repressed, unexpressed, and silent mass shapes and reshapes, stabilizes and destabilizes the visible surface forms." Bernadette was not an already, once and for all fully formed subjectivity when she entered the grotto where she saw aquero. Her experience of the supernatural other did not arise on securely and fully constituted discursive grounds, nor was it completely containable in the stories that first Bernadette and then others told about their experiences of her and of Our Lady of Lourdes.

The Blessed Mother lived in others' lives and they lived in hers. The apparitional figure standing in the grotto was at once known and unknown. She was an appearance. No story about what happened or happens at Lourdes is ever a secure medium of world making or meaning making, subject formation, or power because the narratives of this experience are never free of the interplay of the known and unknown, conscious and unconscious. There is always an excess of intersubjectivity in encounters with the Blessed Mother and the saints, and there is excess in the narratives that precede and follow from them, too. The experience arises on the shadowy and dissolving floe of blue ice. (pages 62-61)

This is an admirable effort to say in precise language that some stories and experiences cannot be contained inside an interpretation even as they attract people to try and interpret them.

I am particularly intrigued by the sentence "there are always three voices, at least : the Virgin Mary [or other saint/presence, I would presume] the one speaking, and the one listening." This reminds me of the Caedmon story which turns on speaking and listening.

As I read Orsi's accounts of spiritual experiences and the interpretations of them by philosophers and theologians and heretics and all-sorts who wanted to the the ones with answers, I also become curious how and where the Doukhabours fit in. The obvious answer seems to be the Protestent side of things, but I wonder? They very much prioritized personal spiritual experience. But they did not, as far as I can tell, link it with specific locations or objects.

Other entries in this series:

(one)

Other people’s stories

I never read (or I don’t remember reading) anything by Heather Armstrong. Nevertheless, the fact I still write in a couple of blogs suggests she had some indirect influence. Something out there made blogging seem to me like a normal, even desirable, activity. Somebody found an audience of women which spun off into smaller audiences for people like me.

Heather Armstrong died by suicide this week, and the social media/news world discussed it enough that it came to my attention, first through an algorithm on a news page (which usually pushes articles about the royal family) and then through a couple of blogs I still sometimes read.

I didn’t know much about her so I chose to read 

this Vox article. I got about halfway through, then I’d had enough*. My conclusion? The internet probably killed Heather Armstrong. There was a lot of wealth and fame and drama and other stuff along the way, of course. But that’s my takeaway. We will never know, but it seems to me there is a decent chance she still would be alive if not for the internet. What about having your life struggles out there as entertainment for people is remotely healthy? I’m sure there’s room for debate but from my point of view, that is the conclusion to draw.

Now I’m still here blogging for my audience of dunno, five people, so isn’t that hypocrisy? All I can say that is if the five people suddenly became millions, or goodness, even hundreds it would change things a lot. I guess I blog in hope of a few good people reading, but more is not better. And none might be best of all. Having no audience is not ruining my life, anyway.

Having not been an audience, I don’t want to rush to judge Armstrong’s writing.  Based on some excerpts I read however, I’m not sure it presented a very helpful picture of motherhood. For sure it’s good to laugh at the trials and absurdity, but the struggles can be overemphasized, making parenthood sound like a constant horror show. It’s not. People need to be able to laugh at themselves and their problems, but we also need a sense of the sublime and a higher purpose in life. I think this can be lost with constant hot takes, over focus on detail and making a priority of being funny/ironic/sarcastic.  Some of us need to rediscover the art of being serious and dutiful and a bit boring.

Apparently Armstrong cursed a lot too, and this is presented as authentic/funny. I must disagree with that. I think cursing is extremely negative and people who do that a lot should be thinking about why and asking if they can be doing something else. 

But it’s hard to speak conclusively of cultural trends. Enough to say I seek support and guidance elsewhere than the confessional blogging/social media world that Armstrong inhabited and where I once had a presence on the margins. And I’m sorry this fellow woman’s story ended this way. 

*I did go back later and read the article to the end.

Up the mountain, making a trail (one)

So almost a year ago, I had a short online conversation with the Substacker Flat Caps and Fatalism, about his piece "Without Saints." I eventually responded with my own blog entry, called "The Saints," where I remembered my life-changing encounter with Caedmon and Hild, and tried re-framing it as an encounter with a saint.

But additionally, in part of our conversation, FCF made this comment:

"....I wonder how common this feeling that you have to make your 'interest' [in saints or some aspect of religion] respectable is. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if there are often seminar rooms with several people all talking in 'respectable' language about something they relate to in a far more complex way.

Have you read Orsi's 'History and Presence'? Your story makes me think of it a lot." (Comments, July 28th 2022)

 I did in fact buy Robert Orsi's History and Presence after that exchange. But when the actual book arrived it look intimidating and I put off reading it. Finally today, a cool May day with rain, the kids at their grandparents', I started reading.

The first few chapters describe the theological disagreements of Catholics and Protestants and how these resulted in violence: rioting, torture, warfare, and (depending on one's affiliation) martyrdom. (Chapter 1, "The Obsolescence of the Gods). Now in the past three years, some aspects of Christianity seem clearer to me, and I even feel something like a call to participate. But, what Orsi describes is completely alienating. Obviously such carnage happened, it is documented, but there is no chime of understanding in me.

Or is there.

Maybe I have just not been listening for it. Maybe it's the last thing I want to hear.

I was born in Canada, with a immigrant Greek father and a Canadian mother of Russian descent. People who hear me say that usually make a few assumptions about my cultural background immediately. Most of them are wrong.

• I don't speak Greek or Russian, and this was deliberate on both parents' part. I never met my dad's parents and while I met my mom's parents and my dad's sister, there was a language barrier.
• I was raised with Christian stories. But not only do I have no background in the Greek or Russian Orthodox churches, I was raised to be actively hostile towards all churches.
• Growing up, I had almost no deliberate exposure to Russian or Greek culture or traditions, though there was some accidental exposure, for sure.
• As a child I celebrated no holidays, not birthdays, not Christmas or Easter or Halloween. Nothing.

Now, my childhood was not terrible; in fact it was extraordinarily rich in many ways. Family has always been my safe place, even when it was complicated, so I'm not trying to make my childhood family sound crazy or anything. Also, there is no doubt in my mind that they were always trying to do what they thought was right.

Still, when I think of my cultural background, it's hard for me to put into words just how fragmented and filled with loss it feels. If I include religious experiences and feelings in there, even more so. It's like an abyss that I only look at sideways, because looking right into it is overwhelming.

But maybe it's time to look at bit more closely at these pieces of cultural inheritance. I will start by learning about the Doukhabours, the Russian sect that my mother's family came from. They were both her cultural inheritance and a group she didn't want to be associated with at all, at least not when she was interacting with people outside her family. The Doukhabours were a sect that developed in Russia, and many eventually came to Canada because of religious persecution. My mother's grandparents were among those that immigrated.

There's some general information on websites, but I'm currently reading this thesis: MQ36523.pdf (doukhobor.org) It is a history and comparison of the Doukhabours and Mennonites. It will take me a while to go through it, so I'm optimistically titling this blog entry as "one" assuming there will be other entries. (But I'm kind of bad at long reading projects, so the likelihood of me making progress, or alternately, just continuing to be angsty and confused are equally likely.)

Observations/questions so far:

• I don't know if it's possible to reach a sympathetic understanding of the early Doukhabours (the ones who lived in Russia). So far I find it hard to relate (several levels of dislocation). It's natural to want to find points of sympathy with one's ancestors, but so far not.
• The history of the Doukhabours frequently involves isolation from the mainstream society as they tried to maintain their culture and religious practices.
• Many of the bloggers/stackers I read speculate about stepping away from an increasingly technological society and forming "parallel societies". There is logic to it, even a sort of cool "rebel" factor. But reading Doukhabour history should give one pause before promoting this idea. Corruption, scandal and misery are all just as likely in an isolated society, if not more so. It's rather depressing to read about, truthfully.

The metaphor in the title:

My maternal grandparents' property included a small forested mountain. On occasion, my brothers and I and sometimes my parents would hike up it. There were no trails and I remember these mountain excursions as challenging, exhilarating and spiced with a sense of risk and danger. In reality it couldn't have been more than a half-hour hike and I didn't have any trouble even as a small child. But there was a powerful sense of being off the map, away from the civilized world, into an unknown. So that is kind of how this research undertaking feels.

I will also try to continue reading History and Presence. It will be helpful background info I'm sure. Also I'm curious what exactly reminded FCF of my writing in the book, because it certainly is not obvious yet.

Other entries in this series:

(two)